Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

If you have a new product or company, or more simply, you’re starting out on social media, how do you find out what’s being said about your market, company and products?

On July 23 from 1:30 – 2:30 PM Eastern, we’ll explore the topic of what to listen for when coming in to a new market or vertical.

We’ll discuss:

How to find your keywords surrounding your products/brand

What’s being said about your competitors. The good and the bad.

What’s being said about the business leaders in your field

How to find the most influential voices in your prospective communities

How to strike up conversations with those movers and shakers

And much more!

I’ll be leading the webinar and I look forward to the dialogue.

Jason Harris’ Bio

Jason Harris is Sr. Manager of Community and Evangelism at Sysomos. He manages Sysomos’ social strategy and Evangelism program. Jason works like mad to ensure data is relevant to decision makers and stakeholders.

At Sysomos, Jason serves as a corporate liaison for the company’s clients, partners and customers as the head of community and brand evangelism.

Jason’s background is in corporate blogging, corporate community building and management and influencer marketing.

What does your activity on social media say about you? Does it accurately reflect who you are and what you identify with? What about the city you live in? If an outsider were to look in, what would they deduce about the things members of your community collectively say and share on social networks?

These are some of the questions Red Bull Records hopes to answer. Why? It’s all part of a multi-touch campaign to celebrate and engage with fans. Fans of music. Fans of artists under the Red Bull Records label. Fans of everyone whose motto is rooted in living life to the fullest.

Of the various use cases we’ve seen here at Sysomos, it’s also one of the most creative and interesting ways I’ve seen a company integrate and apply social data.

A little bit of backstory here: Red Bull recently released a “World of Red Bull” campaign commercial. Included in the clip are highlights of the facets behind the brand – all set to the backdrop of a catchy new single by AWOLNATION, a multi-platinum artist under Red Bull Records, an independent record label formed in 2007 by Dietrich Mateschitz.

Premiering at the MTV Movie Awards in April, the clip has proved such a success that it’s still being aired across the U.S. and in international markets. The song providing the soundtrack – a track titled “I Am” – has also landed a new gig: it’s become the focus of a new fan engagement campaign for the record label.

Justin Dreyfuss, who oversees digital marketing for Red Bull Records explains; “Given the level of attention the TV commercial is bringing to the song, we wanted to find a way to not only highlight the song to fans, but also maximize exposure and reach a new fan base.”

The Campaign: What Defines You?

Indeed they did. Taking direction from the song’s core message, the team flipped the track’s title on its head and placed it at the center of a multi-city fan engagement campaign – Red Bull Records and AWOLNATION want to know: Who are you? What are the things that define you?

Share your thoughts on social channels accompanied by #iamawolnation and you’re game to be part of a compilation that will highlight what makes AWOLNATION fans unique.

In addition to asking fans how they see themselves, the team also wanted to know what people were already saying about themselves on social channels, especially in tour markets and cities where the band is scheduled to play this summer. Currently crossing North America, AWOLNATION’s Run Tour will touch down in thirty eight cities, culminating on August 1 in Los Angeles.

“That’s kind of where the idea to profile cities came in,” explains Dreyfuss. “A way to highlight the song as the band tours across the country.” “That’s also where the idea to create infographics came in,” Red Bull Records’ Technical Strategist, Nic Chang, adds. “We thought it would be interesting to categorize and see what people were saying about themselves on social media – sort of a social listening experiment.”

The Cities: SF, LA, San Antonio

Ten cities were chosen to profile: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Montreal, New York, Indianapolis, Toronto, Detroit, Minneapolis, Chicago and San Antonio. Using Sysomos MAP to tap into and analyze millions of tweets across each, the team began by looking at the query terms needed for the search set.

“We started with the term ‘I am’ and variations thereof, like ‘I’m’, and then dove into it,” Chang explains. Narrowing the scope to parse through the noise of unrelated results, the team then experimented with words and phrases commonly used in tandem. “So not necessarily only searching for the phrase ‘I am,’” he continues, “but including associated words and phrases into the query, like ‘I am going,’ ‘I am feeling,’ or ‘I am listening to.’”

Once the search set was built, it was run uniformly against a year of tweets from each city (enough time to ensure the data set was large enough to capture a wide breadth of data). “For data integrity,” says Chang. “If there was an event in any one of those cities, for example. That stuff would be normalized out.”

What did they find? “San Francisco was very writer heavy,” Dreyfuss shares. “We saw a lot of people talking about writing a book or writing an article. San Antonio, on the other hand, was all about the rodeo.”

How did they determine what made each city unique? “The terms selected for each city were those that over-indexed – meaning it was something that indexed only in that city and nowhere else,” explains Chang. “The terms are more unique, as far as the conversation happening in these cities,” adds Dreyfuss. “So not necessarily terms ranking first, second, and third.”

“Once we identified the terms we found interesting,” continues Chang, “we tried to find the particular tweets that specifically mentioned that term, just to make sure we had the right context. The word cloud feature then helped us determine the frequency in which the term was used in the search set.“

Infographics were then developed to showcase the uniqueness of each city. As a long-time resident of San Francisco – eleven years and running – I have to say: there is much more to our community than being tired all the time and always going to work. That said, these terms were determined by what we as a community share as a whole on social networks – it may not truly reflect who we are (or think we are), or what we truly identify with. On the other hand, maybe we here in SF are just a bunch of tired, complaining, workaholics (ba dum tsch).

My reaction is kind of the whole point to this data-science experiment. It makes me want to join the #iamawolnation conversation to share what we here in SF are really all about. We’re outdoorsy. We love music and going to concerts. We work a lot (ok that one might be true).

“Initially conceptualized around the song, and around particular lyrics in the song, we wanted this campaign to be a means for fans to express themselves,” says Chang. “Not just in the declarative, factual kind of way, but also aspirationally; who they’d like to be, how they want to be seen.”

The Surprising: Beaches, Hockey, and Feeling “22”

Amidst this whole process, I was curious to know what Chang and his team found that was most surprising. “Funny you should ask,” says Chang. “In general, people across all cities love tweeting about going to the gym. We ran the numbers: nine percent of the time someone tweeted about going somewhere, it was to the gym.”

Other interesting tidbits:

Across the board, people love tweeting about wanting to go to the beach, regardless of how close the beach was to them

Winnipeg loves the NHL Jets. No matter what category was surveyed, the NHL Jets were trending (explains the top-trending hashtag: #gojetsgo)

Detroit was the most profane city analyzed – with an average of 4 curse-words appearing in their top 50 terms, regardless of the query

Oklahoma has the biggest concentration of Taylor Swift fans, with 3.62% feeling “22”

Jail was the 7th highest destination in Santa Cruz, Calif.

Think that’s the end of it? Chang and Dreyfuss’ team have only just begun. When the campaign wraps up in August, they’ll compile a unique infographic for the results of the #iamawolnation engagement campaign – which we’ll share here alongside campaign results and key learnings.

Be sure to check back for updates – or make it easy on yourself and subscribe to the Sysomos blog – to stay apprised of developments.

Yesterday at Social Media Week LA (#SMWLA) we had the distinct honor of presenting to a packed room of eager social media folks on how they can use social intelligence to make their businesses better.

Our very own Jason Harris, Nicolette Martin and Josh Graham spoke to an attentive audience about the theory of what social intelligence is (which we’ve covered here on the blog many times before) and, more importantly, how companies can apply it to their everyday work, supported with actual use cases from some of our amazing Sysomos clients.

In the presentation our team covered why social listening is important, but also why companies need to move past just listening. Turning that listening into true social intelligence is what will help companies to better understand their audiences and customers and, in turn, make overall better decisions that will make their business better.

Some of the topics covered in this presentation include using social intelligence to:

Benchmark

Take the guess work out of what your company is doing by supporting decisions with actual facts and stats

Guiding merchandising decisions

Crisis communication

Influencer marketing

And, of course, keeping your customers happy

Each of these topics is backed up with specific use cases of how actual companies were able to do these things using Sysomos software.

We invite you to view the presentation for yourself in the SlideShare below:

If you’d like to learn more about how you can put social intelligence to work for your company, we’d love to speak with you. Feel free to request a demo of our Sysomos software and we’d be more than happy to teach you more.

During the week of June 8-12, Team Sysomos is traveling to beautiful West Los Angeles to participate in the learnings, explorations and connections to be made at Social Media Week LA. We’ve been involved with Social Media Week events in the past but this time, we’re going all in with two speaking opportunities, a booth to meet our current and yet-to-be discovered friends and much, much more.

Social Media Week is a unique event, offering fascinating keynotes, resourceful masterclasses and plenty of 1:1 networking to ensure you leave with plenty of learnings and new connections to put to work in your life as a digital marketer. SMW LA appeals to marketing staff and executives alike.

Come see us at our booth!

At Bergamot Station in Santa Monica at SMW LA headquarters, come see Sysomos at our booth. We’re going to have tables in case you want to set your stuff down and re-charge. We’ll also have a Tickr-powered monitor to show real-time #SMWLA conversation as it happens and of course you can see all the Sysomos products and get a demo.

Come find us in the main exhibitor tent area at SMW LA.

Sysomos presents

Sysomos will have two speaking engagements at SMW LA, including a stage presentation and a masterclass. Both presentations are on the topic of social intelligence. Our Chief Evangelist and SVP Marketing, Amber Naslund will give a keynote main-stage presentation on Thursday morning at 11:00 AM Pacific time. This session will be Livestreamed and we’ll update @Sysomos on Twitter with the proper link when it’s available.

Also, we’ll be facilitating a Masterclass on Wednesday afternoon at 3:30 PM. In this masterclass, I’ll be speaking with Nicolette Martin and Josh Graham, talking about the importance of social intelligence with applied case studies. Whether you use Sysomos or not, the Masterclass will equip you to go back to your work full of applied examples to learn from.

Follow along, no matter your location

As much as we’d love to see you next week in LA, if you can’t make it to Santa Monica, please follow along via social media. We’ll be updating the Sysomos Blog and our Twitter and Instagram feeds with images and goings-on while in LA.

On Tuesday, May 12 in Boston, 150 practitioners and vendors came together to discuss social media marketing and specifically the tools we all use in our day-to-day work lives.

Companies such as Schneider Electric, AT&T Mobility and agencies discussed frustrations of today’s social marketing realities and swapped stories and tools to enable us all to do our jobs better.

The one-day event was hosted by Neal Schaffer, a friend of Sysomos and a known social media consultant and influencer. The day was a fantastic balance of keynotes, informative panels and smaller group discussions.

Here are three things we learned while attending the Summit:

Too many companies aren’t measuring and re-evaluating their efforts enough

A recurring theme throughout the day is that there’s not enough re-thinking and fresh thought in social activations, both in person and online. Sure we have measurement tools and ways to quantify whether our efforts are paying off, but it’s apparent that many marketing departments are simply re-using the same methods and not critically asking questions to reshape and refine social-led projects and efforts.

The main reason is that marketing folks aren’t talking to one another enough. To me this shows that more conferences and summits such as Social Tools Summit are needed. It’s fantastic to have face to face time with other marketing executives and leaders to swap stories, share learnings and help one another perfect our crafts.

Practical advice is just as important as overarching theories

The organizers of Social Tools Summit had the presenting table set up in an innovative way. At the center was the moderator or key speaker and to his/her left was a panel of VP and C-level executives presenting ideas. To the right of the speaker was a panel of 4 “Trenders”, these were younger practitioners who are on the front lines of social media projects and efforts.

It was refreshing to be able to hear a theory from a senior level person followed by a practical example or tale from the front line. This presentation style was refreshing and very informative.

Measurement is one thing – intelligence is another

At the end of most campaigns, social metrics are gathered along with talking points and other learnings from the project. But too often, social intelligence isn’t applied. As social leaders and communicators, we need to apply a “would we do this again” question to each project to evaluate future efforts. Let’s stop reporting numbers and paint our reports with added context and relevancy back to our core missions. If we’re not doing this, we’re missing the whole point!

Thank you

To Neal and the entire team who put on Social Tools Summit, thank you. It was announced that a second Summit would take place this coming Fall in San Francisco. So if you missed out on the Boston event, be sure to catch it on the West Coast this autumn

Last week we had the extreme pleasure of sponsoring The W2O Group’s 5th Annual PreCommerce Summit. This is a gathering of some very smart people to talk about what’s driving markets and people today. The event was a whole day of speakers from across a wide variety of industries that had something interesting to teach everyone in the audience. Topics for the day ranged from data across all industires to biases in our minds and workplaces to to the internet of things to telling better stories and even a fun fireside chat with Al Roker.

While everyone that spoke at this event had something interesting to say or teach the crowd, we picked out 5 things that we thought everyone in any industry should learn and can think about. In no particular order, here they are:

Mike Marinello’s talk at the PreCommerce Summit was actually about the need to be able to measure everything they do so they can show the value of it. That said though, Marinello said that his company isn’t afraid to try new and different things to attain their goals. When they know exactly what they’re measuring towards, they can try interesting new things because they will know which of them works and which don’t. Not everything is going to work in terms of helping to achieve your goals, but you’ll never know what else will if you’re not willing to at least try new and different things.

As the Global Analytics Manager, Chuck Hemann sees a lot of data every day. He knows though that not all of it can be fully used all the time. That’s why he tells his team to pick out the one or two points of data that they think are most important for what the company is trying to achieve and tell that data’s story in a way that everyone will understand. Why is that data important? What does it mean to us right now? What does it mean we should be doing in the future? Data is very important to companies today, but you can sometimes have way to much data. Know what data is important and don’t just show numbers to people, use that data to tell a story and make people understand why it’s so important.

“Engage or die” – Ray Kerins, SVP, Head of Communications and Government Relations, Bayer

Ray Kerins works in the world of pharma, which is notorious for having a lot of restrictions around what they can and can’t say. However, in a world where everyone and anyone has a voice, Kerins knows that if him and his team aren’t joining the conversation along with those other voices, whatever they say will be the only thing heard. Kerins talked about how he believes engagement is the way to get your story heard by everyone, especially those talking about you. If you don’t engage with those people that are talking about you then those people will own your compny’s story, not your company. So, engage or die.

Too often we hear “this new app/software is going to change the game.” But how often is that actually the case? During his talk at the PreCommerce Summit, Mike Edelheart was quick to point out that tech can sometimes help to change games, but really it’s the business model behind what the tech is doing that’s the driving factor. Yes, Netflix was a technology, but it was really it’s streaming movies and TV shows anytime anywhere business model that changed the game. Same with Uber. Uber is an app, but it completely changed the business model for how people can get from point A to point B quickly and efficiently. So if you really want your company to be the next big industry disruptor, maybe don’t think about that app you have to build and think about how you can change the way you’re doing business to do it better.

“Stop thinking of marketing like war and instead think of it like a garden” – Daina Middleton, Head of Global Business, Twitter

Daina Middleton started her talk by pointing out the fact that a lot of marketing terms are very similar to war terminology. Marketers talk about their stratagies and tactics to get their messages out. But in a world where marketing has turned into cultivating relationships and communities, maybe we need to think of marketing more like a garden. Relationships don’t just happen because you have a good marketing campaign. They happen because you need to put time and effort into slowly gaining trust and then nurturing that so that you can form an actual relationship with people. It’s very much like a garden. Your garden doesn’t grow overnight because you found the best soil or water. It grows over time because you put time and effort into it. Middleton actually has a formula for participation that says Discovery + Engagement + Connection = Participation, which is what makes up a real community. And all of these things take time and effort, but are much more worth it in the long term.

These are just a few things that we learned at the 5th Annual PreCommerce Summit, but they are also things that we think every company can start thinking about and act on right now. For a full run down of what every speaker had to say during the PreCommerce Summit, check out the W2O blog.

It’s that time of year again when thousands of tech, marketing, music and film people head down to Austin, Texas for the giant gathering known as SXSW (that’s South by South West, just in case you didn’t know).

While a lot of people head to Austin for this big event, not everyone can make it. And we feel your pain. We know how badly you want to come down to learn, network, see some great films and hear a ton of music for almost two weeks straight.

Well, we don’t want you to miss out on all the action just because you’re stuck at home. That’s why we’ve teamed up with our friends at Tickr to create the SXSW Social Tracker. This way, you can watch all of the great stuff happening at SXSW that people are talking about in social right from the comfort of… where ever you are.

We’ve used our Sysomos software to track all mentions of SXSW, including some category breakdowns, and fed that data through one of Tickr’s fantastic dashboards so that no one has to miss a thing.

We’ve split this dashboard into two separate pages that you can navigate between on your own to see what’s happening down in Austin.

The first page is Live Conversations. Here you’ll find all the SXSW action streaming up your screen in beautiful bubbles in real-time. As long as someone mentions SXSW (or one of it’s many variations) in social media, we’ll capture it and show it to you.

The second page will allow you to really focus in on what you’re interested in at SXSW. On this page you’ll find four boxes of categories that you can change as you see fit. Inside the boxes you’ll see the latest social conversations from SXSW related to the topic you’re interested in. Right below that category’s box you can see levels of conversation around that topic and some of the key words that are driving the conversation for that specific topic. Topics that you can flip back and forth between using the box’s drop-down menu include:

Film

Music

Celebrities

Tech

Marketing

Social

Keynotes

Food

Parties

and Transportation

Whether you’re actually at SXSW or somewhere else, you can always know what’s happening in Austin with this live dashboard. Ready to see it?

And if you do happen to be in Austin for SXSW, keep an eye out for our Sysomos teammates who will be down there. They’re dying to meet as many people as they can, so stop them on the street and say hi.

Also, keep an eye out for people riding around town on our #SysomosSmart bikes.

As South by Southwest Interactive starts on Friday, March 13th, thousands of attendees will descend upon Austin, Texas.

Sysomos will be at SXSW meeting with clients, hosting an amazing happy hour on Monday evening and networking with our friends and colleagues in the industry.

If you’re going to be at SXSW Interactive, we have a special way for you get around Austin. If you’ve ever attended SXSW, you know that taxis are virtually impossible to hail and getting around via car is super frustrating.

So, Sysomos has arranged for a number of bicycles to be made available to attendees of the conference, for free!

That’s right! Because we love you, we want you to ride around on a Tern foldable bike for all of SXSW Interactive. The bike will come with lights, helmet and other Sysomos swag so you can cruise around sunny Austin in style and comfort.

So, to get on the list to possibly get a bike, fill out this entry form and we’ll be in touch if we can facilitate you riding around Austin the Sysomos Smart way.

Last week we made a prediction on which film we thought was going to win the Best Picture category at The Oscars over the weekend. We were wrong.

However, if we looked only at Twitter data, we probably would have been right, because Birdman had run away with the conversation on Twitter.

As they say, hindsight is always 20/20. So with clear eyes we’ve created a Sysomos Report looking back at how the evening at The Oscars played out on Twitter.

The first interesting thing that we found was that this year’s Oscars only 8.48 million mentions across social media, which was 39% less than the 2014 Oscars. 99.5% of all of those mentions came from Twitter, which is why we examined Twitter heavily for this report.

Aside from just analyzing the overall theme of The Oscars, we’ve dug deeper into three categories that stood out to our team during the awards. The first is how people were talking about the host. This year’s show was hosted by Neil Patrick Harris and while a lot of people liked him, people seemed to have liked Ellen DeGeneres, who hosted last year, even more. When we compared the two years together we found that NPH was only mentioned in one Oscars related tweet to every 10 that Ellen was mentioned in the previous year. We also looked into who people were tweeting that they’d like to see host next year.

Second, we looked at which of the acceptance speeches was tweeted about the most. Here we found that Patricia Arquette’s acceptance speech for her Best Supporting Actress win in which she spoke about equality for women. This stirred up a lot of talk from the Twitter world, some good and some bad, but was by far the most tweeted about speech.

Lastly, we looked at the #AskHerMore hashtag, which was being used to imply that women have a lot more to talk about than just who they’re wearing as they walk down the red carpet and that reporters covering it should care more. While this hashtag was actually started in 2014, our report finds that 59% of the total times the hashtag has been tweeted was done on Sunday night.

Sunday night was one of the biggest nights for music of the year, the 57th Annual Grammy Awards.

The Grammys are always a big event as people tune in to watch their favourite artists perform, see if their favourite artists win awards for their music and, of course, to see what all the celebrities are wearing as they walk down the red carpet.

As like every award show these days, people also love to tweet along as they watch everything play out live on TV. This year, tweets around the Grammys surpassed 10.8 million. That’s a 28% increase in tweets compared to the 2014 Grammys.

Our Sysomos Reports team saw all this action and took a deeper dive into those more than 10.8 million tweets to see what all the action was about. We found that tweets seemed to fall mostly into three categories, which our team then explored in depth; overall Grammy tweets, tweets about nominated artists and tweets about who was the best and worst dressed at the awards. We then put together a report to share our findings around each of these categories to share with you.

In the Sysomos Report below you’ll find information like:

Re-tweets accounted for 64% of Twitter content, while 33% were regular tweets and 3% were replies

Online activity peaked at 11 PM, when Sam Smith won the Record of the Year award

The live performances during the award show generated over 326K mentions and were the most popular theme of the night as well as the key driver of positive conversations (33% of the overall positive content)

Winners of the award categories we examined were generally the most tweeted about predictions, except for the album of the year category (which apparently Kanye West didn’t agree with either)

People thought that Taylor Swift was the best dressed of the evening while they also thought that Madonna was the worst dressed